[MUD-Dev] Re: META: What are you looking for in this list?

["Koster, Raph" <rkoster#origin,ea.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: J C Lawrence [mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 1998 4:46 PM
> To: mud-dev#kanga,nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: META: What are you looking for in this list? 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 23 Sep 1998 00:20:08 -0400 
> Hal Black<hal#moos,ml.org> wrote:
> > Another benefit I find is when someone says something succinctly
> > or puts a label on something, which in turn brings together a lot
> > of loose ideas that I had been thinking about previously into a
> > coherent whole.  
> 
> I'm sure Koster would appreciate assistance in collecting such
> 'laws' in cogent form.  

As good a time as any to mention (now that JCL let it slip) that I am
trying to collect said laws into a nice little package for posting.
Here's a sample, complete with tacky names taken from posters here:

Kesselman's Theorem: A MUD universe is all about psychology. After all,
there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.

Social Interaction Postulate: mud social bonds evolve from the fictional
towards real social bonds; if you have good community ties they will be
OOC ties, not IC ties.

Koster's Law (as stated by Mike Sellers, I didn't name it, lest you
think I am blowing my own horn...): The quality of roleplaying in a
given virtual world is inversely proportional to the number of people
playing.

etc etc blah blah. :) Please DO send me other such little nuggets you've
spotted in the list--my objective is very much to provide a nice primer
of basic lessons that we may not all realize we know. Defining our
knowledge of state of the art is the first tsep towards pushing the
boundaries...

-Raph